Carefully I pried the stiff, cold fingers apart. At the center, as I expected
and feared, was a centimeter-wide stone of bright milky green, like an
emerald only far deeper. It was smooth around most of its diameter but had
a rough backside.
I exhaled slowly, and backed away a step. Sire Koucey and Sir Cei had
crowded around me, and when I stepped back they jumped as if bitten by
the thing. Then they relaxed when it didn't do anything in particular. Of
course, if they knew what it was, they would have headed for the horizon as
fast as their feet could carry them.
* * *
I never wanted to be a wizard – indeed, the thought had never occurred
to me.
My plans around adolescence centered on finding some way to get Hedi
the Miller's Daughter alone and up her skirts and eventually inheriting the
shop some day and baking bread for the rest of my life. Noble goals, these.
But Fate, or Luck, or the Gods had other plans, and about the time I
started growing hair in unlikely places and cracking my voice, things just
started happening.
I began learning the basics of professional-class baking as soon as I
could knead dough. I had a perfectly common boyhood for the first twelve
years of my life as my father's apprentice. Nothing more extraordinary than
fights and stolen kisses ever happened, and if I blackened more eyes than I
received it was probably because I ate too many cookies and was strong
from toting too many bags of flour. And cutting too much firewood.
You might not appreciate just how much firewood a good-sized bakery
requires on a daily basis. Dad's ovens were huge. Between the needs of the
castle and the village and the regular contracts for journeybread Dad had
with barge captains, he had two large ovens that rose above the roof of our
house, and one small one that was still pretty damn big. They were rooms
unto themselves, large enough for a man to crawl into to clean (and guess
who got that job?).
They dominated the rear of our house, great pregnant-looking domes
constructed of wicker and river clay. Dad had painted them the traditional
red, of course, and you could see them for almost a mile downriver.
Every morning he (or one of his apprentices) would get up long before
dawn and start the laborious process of feeding the fires, banked the
previous day. Every third day someone (always one of his apprentices –
rank hath its privileges) would climb in with a broom and spade and
excavate the mounds of ash before they relit the fire and began stacking
wood upon it. It took half a chord of wood to re-heat the large ones back to
baking temperature and another half to keep it going all day. We used a lot
of wood – Dad employed three families of woodcutters to supply him.
I started toting wood from the shed to the ovens as soon as I was old
enough to walk. At first it was fun. Then it was work. Then it was torture.
By the time I was twelve I had lugged whole forests of trees into the gaping
maws of the ovens.
While I didn't know it at the time, my magical Talent (or rijara, as the
old Imperials call it) was starting to come out.
It was little things, at first, things I didn't even notice back then. During
hide-and-seek I could always find everyone, no matter how cleverly hid, or
hide myself so well that I'd never be found. While playing ball games I
always knew when and where the ball would be before it got there.
Perfectly normal "childhood" magic, the kind that every kid everywhere
thinks that they can do.
But in late winter of my thirteenth year things came to a head. I'll never
forget that day as long as I live.
I had spent most of the night fuming about a fight with my youngest
sister. Urah and I had always been at odds, largely because we were closest
in age. In truth she was no better or worse than my other sisters when it
came to alternately teasing and spoiling me. But Urah had a temper, and she
often took it out on me when she was fed up at being the youngest girl but
not the youngest child.
We fought often, over stupid things, and sometimes it escalated beyond
reasonable sibling rivalry and came to blows and nasty tricks. I don't
remember what the particular offense was, but I do recall that she got away
with something big and blamed me for it.
As a result, Dad had given me punishment detail for three weeks. In our
house there was only one punishment: feed the ovens. That particular day I
had gotten up way too early, gulped a cup of hot milk, and stomped out into
the late fall chill to begin my torture. I fumed at Urah the entire time.
I stomped my way back and forth between the shed and the ovens, a
journey that I had long ago calculated to be twenty-three steps both ways,
and on each trip back I held almost as much wood as I could carry. Every
step of the way I cursed Urah under my breath. Not a good idea in front of
the oven, which is also a shrine to Briga, the Fire Goddess (in Boval they
call her Breena, other places Breega, but in Talry she was Briga), but I was
pissed off at my sister and figured the goddess would understand.
By trip six (it took nine trips for enough wood to get the fires started)
the exercise had warmed me up. By trip eight I had loosened my jacket, and
my boyish curses had become audible. At the end of trip nine I stacked
wood as if every piece was aimed at my sister's head. I had worked myself
into such a frenzy that I didn't even realize that I had started a fire.
With magic.
I stood and gaped in horror as the dry poplar and oak sputtered into
flame. In moments a roaring fire was making my face uncomfortably hot.
Smoke poured out of the oven's mouth, as it normally did. The fire was
spreading evenly from place to place. It was a perfectly laid fire. But I knew
for a fact that I hadn't started it. The spill I would have used was inside the
house on the hearth altar yet.
Had Briga heard me? I wondered, horrified that I might have just
doomed my sister to a premature and fiery death. I dropped the rest of my
wood and started to run away, when I ran smack into my father's rotund
belly. I looked up at him with tears in my eyes, and he looked down at me,
concerned.
"I saw the whole thing," he said, softly. "Get your cloak on and go out
to the shed, to my workroom. There are some things you and I need to
discuss."
I nodded, and then remembered my chores. "What about the oven?"
"I'll get Urah to do it. She should be up by now, anyway. She'll never
catch a man if she stays lazy like that." I grinned at him, relieved that he
wasn't angry at me.
I grabbed my heavy wool cloak and trudged outside to the woodshed.
When you think woodshed, you probably think of a tiny shack just big
enough to store a half a chord or so. Perhaps if we were a simple farmstead;
my Dad burned so much wood that he required a huge shelter for it.
The entire right side of it was full of firewood, while the left side held
my Dad's workbench and tools, as well as a few extra bags of flour and salt
and such. Behind that was Dad's workroom. Mama may have run the house
and shop like a Duchess, but the shed was my Dad's domain, a place of
refuge from his wife and family when he craved solitude.
I was almost as shocked by the invitation as I had been by the magical
fire. Dad's workroom was Forbidden Territory, inviolate, his inner sanctum.
It was where Dad kept his records and did his accounts – my father was
proud of his literacy and secretive about his money. I found out later that he
kept his secret recipe book there, too, the one he claimed didn't exist, in a
brick lined safe under the floor. Mama never even went in there.
To be caught anywhere near it was grounds for a switching. An
invitation within had never been extended to any of my kin that I knew of. I
waited outside until Dad showed up, not able to bring myself to enter alone.
He didn't speak, just laid a fire in the tiny stove, and poured water into a
small tin kettle on top. Two mugs were set out, and I could smell the
crushed kafa leaf in their bottoms.
"Well, son," he finally began in his deep baritone, "it looks like you
broke the egg basket on this one."
"Dad, I don't know what--"
"What happened? I think I do. But I'll need a little help to explain it,"
and with that he reached up on the top shelf and took down a small, pintsized earthenware jar.
I knew about that jar. Just about every kid's dad in the village had one
of those jars stashed somewhere where their wives wouldn't find it. It
contained a very powerful distilled liquor that Opa the Woodcutter made to
supplement his meager income (regular spirits were available to the folk of
Talry, but they were taxed heavily. While Opa's brew was untaxed and,
therefore, illicit, I don't think the baron or anyone else minded his discreet
trade).
Opa brought a new pint every week when he made his regular delivery.
Sometimes when Dad had friends over, he'd take them out back to "show
them something in the shop," and they almost always seemed friendlier
when they returned.
He pulled the cork and took a deep sip, then handed it to me. I was in
shock. This meant I was a man, by the unsophisticated standards of village
artisans, and I swallowed repeatedly before I could bring myself to take a
drink of the liquid fire. I coughed and sputtered, but Dad expected this and
was ready with a cup of water. When I had calmed down (and warmed up
significantly) he had me tell him everything I could about the event.
When I was done he took the jar back and stood up, sighing. I sat there
silently and watched him putter around, looking behind books and under
papers for his pipe and herb pouch. I found watching him comforting. He
seemed so calm, and the shock of the earlier event was starting to fade into
a dreamlike unreality.
Armed with pipe and pouch, he sat back in his chair and began the ritual
of packing it. He also began telling me about my family, on my mother's
side.
Mama's people were from Poom Hamlet. Twenty-miles upriver and
inland another six. But they weren't from the Castali Riverlands originally.
They had re-located there about five generations back from someplace up
North, around the Kuline Mountains.
Family history said that they were nobility – legend said royalty – from
some long-forgotten petty-kingdom in Wenshar, on the outskirts of the
Magocracy. The name Manuforthen was somehow attached to the legend,
though if that was the name of an ancestor or the name of the kingdom, no
one was sure.
What was whispered, though, was that our ancestors had been
magelords, potent magi who had left the borders of the Imperial lands in the
East to strike out on their own, away from the power of the Archmage.
When the Narasi tribes that were my father's ancestors swept down from
the steppes on the decadent Imperial lands, Mama's ancestors had fled
south. Some of them fled to Poom Hamlet, where they settled down, forgot
about magic, and ran the mill.
Dad had never thought anything might come of it – all of Mama's kin
seemed normal enough (except my Uncle Clo, but that's just the way he is),
having intermarried with Narasi over the generations until there was no
trace of their Imperial past in their features. No one else seemed to show
any signs of magic in their blood – but the possibility was always there, Dad
explained. It had always been there, but he and Mama hadn't taken it
seriously. Until now.